Week 14: Positives and Negatives

So this week's entry has a bit of medical jargon, which may or may not be of interest to the reader. I wanted to add it to my journal for family medical history.

---------------------------------

On February 25th, I had my monthly check up with Dr. Partida. It was actually the first time I had met her since I only met with her nurse on my first appointment. It seems that everything is progressing as it should be.

I did, however, learn some interesting information. Evidently, I have a rare blood type of B negative (only about 2% of the population has this blood type). But even more interesting is what I learned about having negative blood (which only about 15% of the population has and probably only half of those are women). If a woman has negative blood and her baby ends up having positive blood (due to the father having positive blood, which is the case with Matt), there can be complications if the baby's blood enters the mother's blood stream (such as through miscarriage, some sort of accident or delivery). The mother's body will start to produce antibodies to kill the positive blood, thus killing the fetus. To hinder this, there is a fairly simple solution, which is to take a shot at 28 weeks and then again right after delivery to keep the body from producing antibodies. If the body were to learn how to produce antibodies, then during any future pregnancies it would immediately start to produce them, terminating the pregnancy. (This is not a concern for women with positive blood, because positive blood can be mixed with either positive or negative blood types.)

All this was a bit disconcerting to hear at first. But it seems that it can be easily handled if one is aware of the situation. Luckily any daughters that I may have, should not have to worry about this since they will inherit positive blood types from Matt.

On another note, Dr. Partida wants me to come back next week for a sonogram to definitely date the baby and confirm my due date. I can hardly wait to see my little one up on the big screen!

-----------------------

The envelope (with the buttons glued on it) on the right hand side of the journal will include a print out from the internet with some more information on negative blood type for pregnant women as well as info on my parents' blood types. As soon as I learned this about myself, I was curious as to what blood types my parents had and whether my mom had faced the same thing. Evidently both my parents had positive blood types, and occasionally this can result in a baby with a negative blood type (me!). So it was not a concern for my mother.